History

Shortlisted for the RUSI 2013 Duke of Wellington Medal for Military LiteratureFrom the acclaimed, award-winning author of Dark Continent and Hitler's Empire, comes a visionary, far-reaching history of two centuries...

The siege of Venice in 1848 is one of history's most thrilling and tragic episodes. After half a century of Habsburg imperial rule, the Venetians drove out the occupying army...

The word Darien is a scar on the memory of the Scots, and the hurt is still felt even where the cause of the wound is dimly understood. Three hundred...

The modern idea of 'mastery' over nature always had its critics, whether their motives were aesthetic, religious or environmentalist. By investigating how the most fundamental element - water - was...

Originally published in weekly instalments, Nine Suitcases is the Hungarian writer Bela Zsolt's harrowing memoir of his experiences in the ghetto of Nagyvarad and as a forced labourer in the...

The 20th century was a golden age of map-making, and maps permeated almost every aspect of daily life. It was a century overshadowed by war which was also marked by...

Terrorism has changed. New terrorist ideologies have been accompanied by new methodologies - weapons that are harder to detect and suicide tactics that are much harder to protect against than...

Blenheim has gone down in history as one of the turning points of the War of the Spanish Succession - and some would say in the history of conflict in...

VICTORIA CROSS HEROES tells the stories of over 150 individuals whose bravery has earned them the Victoria Cross, Britain's most prestigious medal for courage in action. The book is introduced...

Deep in the archives of the Bodleian Library lies a tattered scrap of paper with newlyweds' scribbles on it. It is a table, listing the qualities of a couple. One...

In this sumptuous vision of Venice, Peter Ackroyd turns his unparalleled skill at evoking place from London and the River Thames, to Italy and the city of myth, mystery and...

"Thames: Sacred River" is about the river from source to sea. It covers history from prehistoric times to the present, the flora and fauna of the river, paintings and photographs...

"The Soviet Tragedy is an essential coda to the literature of Soviet studies...Insofar as [he] returns the power of ideology to its central place in Soviet history, Malia has made...

No nation is a stranger to war, but for Russians war is a central part of who they are. Their "motherland" has been the battlefield where some of the largest...

When Europeans first arrived in North America, they faced a cold new world. The average global temperature had dropped to lows unseen in millennia, and its effects were stark and...

In 1654, England's Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell conceived a plan of breathtaking ambition: the conquest of Spain's vast American empire. As the first phase of his Western Design, a large...

Convened following Napoleon's defeat in 1814, the Congress of Vienna is remembered as much for the pageantry of the royals and elites who gathered there as for the landmark diplomatic...

From the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century, vying armies have clashed over the territory stretching from the Upper Nile to modern-day Iraq and Iran. Crossroads of War captures five...

Spartacus (109?-71 bce), the slave who rebelled against Rome, has been a source of endless fascination, the subject of myth-making in his own time, and of movie-making in ours. Hard...

Frederick Douglass's fluid, changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in the many conflicting accounts he gave of key events and relationships during his journey from slavery to...

In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to...

"A vast cabinet of curiosities."-Stephen Greenblatt"Eclectic rather than exhaustive, less an encyclopedia than a buffet."-Frederic Raphael, Literary ReviewHow do we get from the polis to the police? Or from Odysseus's...

On December 26, 2004, giant tsunami waves destroyed communities around the Indian Ocean, from Indonesia to Kenya. Beyond the horrific death toll, this wall of water brought a telling reminder...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War,...

The bestselling, prize-winning author explores the impact of the Second World War - for nations, cities and families around the world. The Second World War was one of the most...

Survivor on the River Kwai is the heartbreaking story of Reg Twigg, one of the last men standing from a forgotten war. Called up in 1940, Reg expected to be...

Nick Lloyd's Hundred Days: The End of the Great War explores the brutal, heroic and extraordinary final days of the First World War.On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day...

From the bestselling author of The English comes Empire, Jeremy Paxman's history of the British Empire accompanied by a flagship 5-part BBC TV series, for readers of Simon Schama and...

From Keith Lowe, author of the criticall acclaimed Inferno comes an 'extraordinary, disturbing and powerful' (Daily Mail) new history, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II.The Second...

In the Second World War, Great Britain, the United States and Germany each produced one land force commander who stood out from the rest: Bernard Montgomery, George Patton and Erwin...

Learn about the origins of our species and all things revolution in The History Book.Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a...

Lady Constance Lytton (1869-1923) was the most unlikely of suffragettes. One of the elite, she was the daughter of a Viceroy of India and a lady in waiting to the...

This volume provides an in-depth look at the experience of the ordinary US marine 'grunt' in Vietnam. Organisation of the corps, weaponry, equipment, uniforms, training and medical arrangements are all...

The kingdom of Scotland has had a turbulent history, at points the site of a tribal contest and of a far-reaching political controversy. This guide traces the history of the...

*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017*In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Today, much of Syria...

A fascinating insight into the complexity, history and unpredictability of Iraq from Rory Stewart, bestselling author of Politics on the Edge and host of hit podcast The Rest Is Politics.By...

In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling...

Martin Walker's account of over forty years of global confrontation between the US and Russia is a masterly narrative of the Cold War's twists and turns by a journalist who...

In early 1942 the Germans opened a top-security prisoner-of-war camp in Lower Silesia for captured Allied airmen. Called Stalag Luft III, the camp soon came to contain some of the...

Are you ready for the truth about World War Two? The Second World War is the most cataclysmic and violent sequence of events in recent times. But for the past...

Throughout his six decades in the public eye, Winston Churchill understood and wielded the power of words. In his speeches, books and newspaper and magazine articles, he expressed his feelings...